Dylan Bouchard

Author directory

2026

Bias and fairness risks in Large Language Models (LLMs) vary substantially across deployment contexts, yet existing approaches lack systematic guidance for selecting appropriate evaluation metrics. We present a decision framework that maps LLM use cases, characterized by a model and population of prompts, to relevant bias and fairness metrics based on task type, whether prompts contain protected attribute mentions, and stakeholder priorities. Our framework addresses toxicity, stereotyping, counterfactual unfairness, and allocational harms, and introduces novel metrics based on stereotype classifiers and counterfactual adaptations of text similarity measures. We release an open-source Python library, langfair, for practical adoption. Extensive experiments on use cases across five LLMs and five prompt populations demonstrate that fairness risks cannot be reliably assessed from benchmark performance alone: results on one prompt dataset likely overstate or understate risks for another, underscoring that fairness evaluation must be grounded in the specific deployment context.
Large language models have shown impressive capabilities in code generation, yet they often produce functionally incorrect code. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods have emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations in natural language generation, but their effectiveness for code generation tasks remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate how UQ techniques transfer to code generation across three programming languages, five LLMs, and over 1,700 problems. We find that some token-probability-based methods generalize effectively without modification, while sampling-based methods relying on natural language inference (NLI) fail because NLI models cannot distinguish functionally different code, causing most responses to collapse into a single semantic cluster. To address this, we introduce functional equivalence methods, a family of code-specific methods that replace NLI-based semantic equivalence with an LLM-based functional equivalence assessment, including functional entropy, a code-specific analog of semantic entropy. Functional equivalence methods achieve top AUROC in 11 out of 15 model-benchmark combinations and the best calibration across most settings, consistently outperforming both NLI-based counterparts and all other methods evaluated.